Robert Novak and the “Meaningless” Warning

Those who hunted for some wiggle room in last week’s statement by a former CIA flack that he explicitly told Robert Novak not to name Valerie Plame shouldn’t have bothered: In his column this week, Novak doesn’t wiggle so much as burst through, shaking his wrinkled fanny in the face of the CIA:

[The CIA spokesperson] told the Post reporters he had “warned” me that if I “did write about it her name should not be revealed.” That is meaningless. Once it was determined that Wilson’s wife suggested the mission, she could be identified as “Valerie Plame” by reading her husband’s entry in “Who’s Who in America.”

Sure, the warning to not print Plame’s name was “meaningless,” if by “meaningless” Novak means “a way to avoid a multi-million-dollar federal investigation which has tarred the administration, put a reporter in jail, and forced upon us some of the century’s most tiresome op-eds.”

Also, we hear prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is now subpoenaing “Who’s Who.” He has ways of making that book talk.